Wednesday, June 11, 2014

It's the big 150th anniversary today, so here is a little something to celebrate, with pics from my visit to Garmisch in 2012. First, the incomparable Fritz Wunderlich in one of the composer's most beautiful and ardently summery songs, 'Heimliche Aufforderung'. And you can watch the whole of Der Rosenkavalier from Glyndebourne free online here, starring Kate Royal, Teodora Gheorghiu and, of course, the fabulous Tara Erraught, whose star shines bright.

It is often said that behind every great man there is a great woman;
but not every great composer can claim to have achieved a long and happy – if somewhat
tempestuous – marriage to his muse. The soprano Pauline de Ahna was the
powerful presence behind Richard Strauss: his wife, his inspiration and a diva
in every sense. Over his many decades he drew on plenty of different spurs to
musical action, but none more consistently or more powerfully than the soprano
voice.

Strauss’s operas remain arguably his finest achievements and the Royal
Opera House has already marked the 150th anniversary of his birth with a new
production of Die Frau ohne Schatten (1918), the
most complex, symbolic and magical of his collaborations with the playwright
Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Despite its baffling fairytale premise, it deals at heart with matters that are human and domestic: the longing for a family.

Strauss was born into the centre of the German operatic world; his
father, Franz Joseph Strauss, was the principal horn player at the Munich Court
Opera. Loathing the music of Bavaria’s local megastar, Richard Wagner, Franz
Strauss was the only member of the orchestra who did not stand up in respect
when the composer’s death was announced to them. His son took a different view:
“I remember clearly how, at the age of 17 I feverishly devoured the score of Tristan
[und Isolde] and fell into a rapturous ecstasy,” he recalled.

In his teens he composed prolifically; and Hans von Bülow (the first
husband of Cosima Liszt, who then married Wagner) helped him to secure his
first conducting post in Meiningen when he was only 21. Later he held vital posts as conductor in Munich,
Weimar and Vienna; film exists of him on the podium in advanced age at the
Salzburg Festival.

He announced his engagement to Pauline de Ahna shortly after the
soprano – starring in his first (and not very successful) opera, Guntram – had astonished the musicians in
rehearsal by throwing a piano score at him. She was, he later wrote, “very
complex, very feminine, a little perverse, a little coquettish, never like
herself, at every minute different from how she had been a moment before".
They settled in 1908 on the outskirts of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where Strauss
built a substantial jugendstil villa
with the proceeds of Salome’s success; his study housed an Art Deco desk
with a specially commissioned matching piano (pictured above).

“My wife is often a little harsh,” he is reported to have said, “but
you know, I need that.” Not everybody did. Indeed, her cantankerous personality
attracted note from many quarters. In the late 1920s my grandmother-in-law was
dining in a restaurant at Kochelsee, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, when she
spotted at a nearby table her father’s occasional skat (card game) companion
Richard Strauss and his wife. The waiter apologized to Frau Strauss: they were
out of the fish she wanted. He offered her, instead, a nice fresh Saibling. “I
don’t want that scheisse [shitty] fish!” the great lady expostulated,
according to grandma-in-law.

“Strauss would never have become a great man without Pauline,” insisted
the composer’s friend Manfred Mautner-Markhof. The pair’s volatile relationship left its mark
directly upon Strauss’s music, notably in both the Symphonia Domestica
and the tone poem Ein Heldenleben – in the latter she is personified by
a solo violin. But above all, her presence is felt in the power and sensuality
with which he wrote for the female voice, whether in the frenzied finale scene
of Salome, the celebrated trio towards the end of Der Rosenkavalier, or the ecstatic and soaring lines of his solo
songs, including his wedding present to Pauline, Cäcilie.

It was another area of Strauss’s life that housed his most difficult
moments. In 1933 – by which
time he was nearly 70 – he was made head of the Nazi administration’s Reichsmusikkammer,
a state music institute that aimed to promote “good German music” by Aryans.
Declaring that he had been appointed without being consulted first, Strauss
said – perhaps naively – that he hoped he could “do good and prevent greater
misfortune”. He was forced to resign, though, in 1935 when a letter he had
written to Stefan Zweig, the Jewish librettist of his opera Die Schweigsame
Frau, was intercepted by the Gestapo and found to contain cynical words
about the regime.

His attitude towards the Nazis in the ensuing years contained
loathing, but also bursts of sociability – not idealistic as much as
self-interestedly pragmatic. Ultimately both Nazis and anti-Nazis judged
Strauss “a total bystander” or, as Goebbels, put it, “unpolitical, like a
child”. Nobody could escape the fact that he was by then the greatest living
German composer – yet also an intractable soul, uninvolved and caring only for
his family and his work.

Nevertheless, he expected too much of the Third Reich. Strauss’s
daughter-in-law was Jewish; her mother was imprisoned in the concentration camp
at Terezin. The composer drove to its gates believing he could rescue her by
pulling rank; but the guards would have none of it. Eventually he was publicly
humiliated by Goebbels for having made disparaging remarks about Lehár,
Hitler’s favourite composer of operetta. “The art of tomorrow is different from
the art of yesterday,” Goebbels said to him. “You, Herr Strauss, are
yesterday!”

Strauss’s music, though, had the last word. In 1948, the year before
he died, he completed his Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra. Here the
musical language may belong to an earlier age, but its beauty and universality
transcend any such concerns. The last song, “Im Abendrot” (At Sunset) describes
an elderly couple spending the quiet evening of their lives together. “Is this
perhaps death?” asks the soprano, while two flutes evoke a pair of larks rising
towards the heavens. It was his last and perhaps most perfect offering to his
beloved muse, the soprano voice. On 8 September 1949 he died, aged 85. Pauline
outlived him by just eight months.

Pictured right: a statue of Beethoven that stands in Strauss's house. The story goes that when the Americans arrived in the area at the end of the war and turned up at the villa to investigate, one of them asked Strauss who this was. The somewhat unimpressed composer told them it was the Gauleiter of Garmisch.

(This is an adjusted version of my article that appeared in The Independent in January.)

Monday, January 30, 2012

The opening night on Saturday...where to start? The dream-team cast? OK, Amanda Roocroft is The Marschallin for the first time - not that you would guess for a moment she had not been born singing this music. Roocroft is one of the finest actresses in British opera right now - look at her awards for all that Janacek. She can effortlessly evoke the charming, open-hearted aristocrat on the one hand, and, lurking just beneath the surface, a self-destructive woman whose fear of losing her beloved young lover leads her to chase him away; act I's conclusion leaves her cradling a cushion in despair. Sarah Connolly is everyone's perfect Octavian: glowing, dashing, her voice as silvery as her armour (and those of us who follow her updates on Facebook were extra-pleased to see her as she'd been stuck on a motionless train with points failure for half the afternoon).

But perhaps most stunning of all was the debut of Sophie Bevan as Sophie (above, pic by Clive Barda). A star is born? You can't argue with the goose-bumps: you can't always explain them, but you know them when they happen. The moment Sophie opened her mouth, it was clear that she is no common-or-garden girl soprano, but one with potential to reach some very special places indeed. At no point while she sang did one have to glance at the surtitles; every word was clear as the proverbial bell, and every twist of character projected with relish. The voice - pure, flexible, snowy and effortlessly voluminous when required - never faltered; and the magical moments following the presentation of the rose as Sophie and Octavian fall in love made us all fall in love too. The audience went mad for her. I can't wait to hear what she does next.

Nor can you argue with John Tomlinson as the odious Ochs. Some of us feel that the opera contains too much Ochs and too little outrage over his ghastliness (the programme notes said that Strauss makes us like Ochs, but actually no, he doesn't) - but 'John Tom' is so convincing that what one remembers is a) the 18th-century setting would have condemned him to the guillotine had Strauss and Hofmannsthal not shifted the action to Vienna instead of Paris, and b) the world premiere, in 1911, took place only six years before the Russian revolution. Rosenkavalier as social commentary for its own time and maybe for ours too... Meanwhile, so involved was the singer with his role that in the scene with the attorney he turned physically scarlet with anger.

David McVicar's direction of a production as opulently golden as its music is typically astute and detailed - probing, questioning and poetic. For instance, why doesn't Octavian dressed as Mariandel slip out of the boudoir to escape Ochs's attentions? Because the mystery doors in the wall are so mysterious that he can't work out how to get them open. And the last gesture of Octavian towards the departing Marie-Therese before turning back to Sophie sparks an idea that we may not have seen the last of that affair after all...while young Mohamed the page boy has a crush of his own to pursue after curtain-down.

Down t'pit, Ed Gardner was working a magic of his own. This was a shimmering, generous, expansive Rosenkavalier - running to 4 hrs 10 mins, it was 25 mins longer than the theatre's estimate - but not a second of it was excessive. The music had room to breathe, grow and smoulder. Super violin solos from leader Janice Graham and some very lovely woodwind playing.

I have only two complaints. First of all, fine though the diction of the singers was, this opera's entire musical world is so bound up with flow of the German language that in English it just sounds all wrong. That's nobody's fault. I imagine the translation could have been more inspiring, but perhaps it would be a losing battle in any case. The other issue is that the set scarcely changes from scene to scene - without differentiation between the Marschallin's olde-worlde palace and the Faninal's new-build house, half the matter of class distinction, which is such an overriding theme, can't help but be somewhat submerged. Still, sets cost money; and, quite honestly, this cast could have performed in concert alone and still convinced us every step of the way.

Friday, January 27, 2012

First of all, I'm delighted to announce that I have "a new gig", contributing to The Spectator Arts Blog. My first piece is out today and it's a look at six of the best young opera singers I've come across in the last year or so. First up is Sophie Bevan, who will be singing her namesake in Der Rosenkavalier for ENO from Saturday. And five more budding superstars... Read it here.

And it's Mozart's birthday, and it's Friday, so here is some Friday Historical Mozart: the first movement of the Concerto for Three Pianos, with Sir Georg Solti (conducting and playing), Daniel Barenboim and Andras Schiff, and the English Chamber Orchestra. Happy 256th birthday to our darling Wolferl!

GHOST VARIATIONS: the strangest detective story in music, based upon a true incident

"In this splendid new novel Jessica Duchen manages to find the fine balance between fact and fiction. Her book reads like a thriller, yet it's also a tribute to great music and musicians" - Sir András Schiff.Buy it here

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Music and writing in London, UK. Jessica's work has appeared in The Independent, The Guardian, The Sunday Times and numerous music magazines. Current projects include opera libretto, 'Silver Birch', for Roxanna Panufnik and Garsington Opera 2017. Latest novel 'Ghost Variations' (Unbound), Sept 16. "Everything she writes is worth reading" - The Times..."Dazzling perceptiveness" - Joanna Lumley on Songs of Triumphant Love...
Jessica is available for writing and public speaking, including pre-concert talks. Contact: Limelight Celebrity Management, mail@limelightmanagement.com
www.jessicaduchen.co.uk